“Play That Tenor Sax For Me” I wrote for Kenny who was and always will be the love of my life. ♥️ I am most grateful for his love and continued support throughout our marriage.

Kenny Soderblom came from a modest background. His father was a tool-and-dye maker and his mother a beautician. His father planned for him to take over the family business, but when he returned from military service in World War II, he decided to become a musician. He played a number of woodwind instruments; he began playing the clarinet in high school and eventually switched to the tenor saxophone as his main instrument. He worked in the post-war period as a studio musician in radio and television commercials, and as an orchestral musician with such stars as Burt Bacharach, Harry Belafonte, Natalie Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini, Frank Sinatra, Sonny & Cher and The Temptations. He also toured with Gerry Mulligan and Louis Bellson and accompanied vocalists such as Rosemary Clooney, Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Liza Minnelli and Lena Horne.

Kenny Soderbloom led his own group, with which he performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival, performed with the Chicago Symphony, and played with the CBS-Chicago Staff Orchestra. He performed several times at New York’s Carnegie Hall and was musical director at the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park in California. He directed the Jazz at the Bayfront festival for many years. From the late 1990s he lived in Florida. In the field of jazz, according to Tom Lord, he was involved in 25 recording sessions between 1956 and 2009, mostly in Chicago with Paul Severson, Bill Russo and His Orchestra, Lucy Reed, Sture Swenson/Jack Noren, Mike Simpson, Tony Martell, Oliver Nelson (Fantabulous, 1964), Clarence Shaw, Bunky Green, Warren Kime, Bobby Christian, and Les Hooper, among others. In 1995/96 he recorded the album I Dream of Jeanie (lovingly dedicated to the memory of his late wife), in which Kenny Drew Jr., Rick Shaw, and Eddie Metz Jr. participated. In 2009 he recorded the album You and the Night and The Music with his wife Leayh.